The Good Shepherd
John 10: 1-15 Acts 2:42-47
It is Good Shepherd Sunday.
Each year we read from the 10th chapter of John. Often overlooked is
the crucial assertion of Jesus in verse
15, “I have other sheep that are not of this fold….” The church is always
haunted by the notion that perhaps one can be of God and not be of the church,
but long before there even was a church, Jesus makes clear that all of God’s
children, all of God’s sheep, all of God’s critters, are not all of one flock.
This verse may be the most
important one for us to reflect upon and embody and make our own: God has other
sheep and will and does provide for them as God does and will provide for us.
In fact, until we can really embrace that singular notion, it strikes me as
impossible for us to claim what is really at the heart of John’s Gospel – that
Jesus comes so that we might have life, and have it abundantly.
Now all of this is not some
sort of marketing scheme like the Prayer
of Jabez to suggest that if we pray and pray and pray we will get
everything we want. Because it turns out that Jesus, and God, and the Holy
Spirit all agree that we should in fact learn to live with just what we need.
What we want and what we need are two entirely different realms of abundance.
Until we get that straight we will read and re-read our first lesson from the
Book of the Acts of the Apostles and be eternally baffled.
We read in Acts chapter 2, so
soon after Pentecost and the outpouring of God’s Spirit of vitality, that the
early believers devoted themselves to the apostle’s teaching, fellowship, the
breaking of bread and prayers. We read that they had all things, not some
things, not a lot of things, but ALL things in common. We read that all things
would be redistributed to any as had need. They spent much time together and in
the Temple. And day by day God added to their numbers.
Why did people flock to this
early church community? Just look at them. They shared everything with one
another including the most valuable commodity of all, time. “They spent much
time together.” Isn’t it amazing!
Two things in this: We say to
ourselves, “Things were much simpler back then.” I think not. Consider that if
you spent much time with other Christians the good and civilized people of the
Roman Empire would hunt you down, lock you up and send you to the lions or
gladiators to toy with. Also, anyone who has lived with just five or ten or
more people who hold all things in common can tell you that it is no simple
matter to sort out people’s needs and share the goods and possessions
accordingly. Trust me, I have been there.
Secondly, we need to think of
the abundance promised consisting primarily of time shared with others, rather
than an abundance of things. As Jesus asserts time and time again, spending all
our time on the acquisition, accumulation and consumption of things leaves
precious little time for fellowship, relationships and community. The world of
acquisition, accumulation and consumption is a lonely life, an isolated life,
where one spends a lot of time building and filling barns, and now self-storage
lockers, with more and more stuff. There is no time for fellowship,
relationships and community in such a scheme.
Those who take the time to
enter the sheepfold through Jesus the gate, those who hear him calling them by
name, those who desire to follow the good shepherd, come to know two important
things:
1)
What God says to
you in Jesus is this: you are forgiven. Nothing more. Nothing less. This is the
message Jesus spoke and lived. There are other things that he could have said
to us, and most of us are familiar with these because some forms of
Christianity relay such messages as: Good News! If you are very very good, God
will love you. Or, Good News! If you are very very sorry for not having been
very very good, God will love you. Or, God Loves You! Now get back in line
before God changes God’s mind! None of these are truly good news. Instead God
says, “You are forgiven. I love you anyway, no matter what. I love you not
because you are particularly good nor because you are particularly repentant
nor because I am trying to bribe you or threaten you into changing. I love you
because I love you.”
2)
The early Christians
were convinced that the Spirit has a particular care for the church, supplying
the community with all it needs. She does so, however, in a peculiar way. The
gifts you need she gives to someone else. The gifts you are given are meant for
someone else. The Christian community can live only by the sharing and giving
of these gifts. The Church at its best is a community that lives by this kind
of sharing, exercising its generosity not only within its own circle, but
toward outsiders as well. None of us has any higher claim on God than the claim
to God’s willing forgiveness. We are all outsiders, miraculously included
within the community of the gospel by God’s call.
(Points 1 & 2 are both from William Countryman’s,
The Good News of Jesus, [Cowley, Boston: 1993] pp. 3-5, 105)
God sent Jesus to help us to “get”
all of this. God sent Jesus to deliver this “News.” God sent Jesus to call into
community people who want to live this way. People who want to know God’s love
and care for them in this way. To a world that apparently still had not “got
it,” God sent a later revelation through an illiterate, uneducated (by our
standards) camel driver named Muhammad through the revelation of the Quran.
The Quran envisages Muslim/Human
society to look much like that described in Acts 2: every man, woman and child
in the community, Muslim or non-Muslim, is to be provided adequate food,
clothing, shelter, education and full health and medical care. To this end the early
Islamic Empire created the first hospitals, the first world library and
research centers, modern mathematics and numbering systems, public water
purification and delivery systems, and easily available books while European
culture was mired in a dark ages of intramural religious warfare.
As pointed out by Pope
Francis this week, no shepherds of any fold have done a good job of following
through on the vision for human society revealed in Torah, the New Testament,
the Quran, the Confucian Analects, The Tao Te Ching, the Bhagavad-gita, or the
Sutras of the Buddha – this, of course, spoken from one of the more conspicuous
centers of concentrated wealth on Earth. Were we to spend time with sheep of
other folds, and were we to truly share our gifts as God provides and the early
Christian and Muslim communities practiced, we might one day realize that we
are indeed all outsiders miraculously included within the community of God’s
people – that we truly are one people, not many. That simple realization might
very well be enough to establish the kind of society God envisages for every
man, woman and child. Amen.
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